Requiem (Grande messe des morts), Op. 5

Program notes

About the Work

Berlioz’s Requiem, the Grande messe des morts, is one of the most colossal works in the entire repertoire, and the Royal Albert Hall at the Proms is the ideal place to experience its overwhelming scale. Berlioz received the commission in 1837 from the French government, to commemorate the soldiers who died in the July Revolution of 1830, and he seized the chance to think on the grandest possible canvas. The score calls for a vast orchestra and chorus and, most famously, four additional brass bands stationed at the corners of the performing space, plus a battery of sixteen timpani. When all these forces unleash the Dies irae and Tuba mirum, the effect is of the Last Judgement made audible, sound coming from every direction at once.

Yet the Requiem is far more than spectacle, and this is the key to understanding it. Berlioz uses his enormous apparatus with extraordinary restraint and subtlety: the gigantic climaxes are devastating precisely because so much of the work is hushed, intimate and strange. Long stretches are sung quietly, even a cappella; there are passages of aching tenderness and eerie stillness; and the single tenor soloist appears only once, in the radiant Sanctus, floating high and serene above the chorus. The contrast between the apocalyptic and the consoling is the whole expressive point. Premiered at Les Invalides in Paris in December 1837, it remains one of the supreme achievements of French Romanticism, a work that needs the great forces and the great space that this Proms performance provides.

What to Listen For

Listen for the architecture of contrast: the way Berlioz holds back his vast forces so that their unleashing overwhelms. The famous moment is the Tuba mirum (within the Dies irae): after a long build, the four brass bands at the corners of the hall blaze out in turn and the massed timpani thunder, depicting the trumpets summoning the dead to judgement. It is one of the most physically overwhelming sounds in all of music, and unforgettable in a space like the Albert Hall.

But listen just as much for the quiet music around it: the hushed, prayerful opening; the unaccompanied chorus of the Quaerens me; the strange, bare textures (Berlioz’s famous trick of pairing flutes with low trombones in the Hostias). And listen for the Sanctus, where the lone tenor soloist enters, high and ethereal, answered by the women’s voices, a moment of heavenly calm amid the grandeur. The work ends not in triumph but in peace, the chorus murmuring its final ‘Amen’ into stillness. It is a piece that uses the largest means to arrive at the most profound serenity: overwhelming, but ultimately consoling.